Xenophobia offends me. [View all]

It is irrational, unrealistic and cruel. Compassionless and heartless.

I saw a video clip somewhere on TV a few weeks ago of a dirty, bedraggled woman wriggling through the dust underneath a barbed wire fence. An equally bedraggled man was crawling underneath the fence beside her. There was that woman and her daughter some months back who got tangled up in Greg Abbott's razor wire in the Rio Grande and drowned trying to get across. We've all seen videos of dirty ragged groups of people staggering toward the river or across a desertscape somewhere at the border.

Thinking about these people, I often think, What kind of awful situation are these people in that they find it necessary to subject themselves to this desperate situation in an attempt to escape from it? Why are we being so cold and unfeeling about the terrible plight these people are obviously finding themselves in? They are obviously not criminals, rapists, thieves, drug dealers, or anything of the sort. They are poor people who find themselves in an awful situation that they are desperately trying to escape from. Why do so many of us have these cruel attitudes toward them?

We should instead be trying to live up to the ideals in the Emma Lazarus poem, Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We should be striving to honor by our actions the ideals preached by the rabbi from Nazareth. We should be living the concept of American exceptionalism. One component of that exceptionalism is the notion of Americans as good and decent practitioners of Christian charity and compassion for our fellow human being. Instead, we are now a bunch of heartless, suspicious, cynical xenophobes.

I am not saying we should let anybody through our borders. We should vet them, but we should do so with a spirit of charity and compassion, instead of the ugly attitudes the current administration has toward them. And if we err, we should err on the side of the former attitudes, not the latter ones.

— Ron